About Chocolate Parfaits

Les amours imaginaires

The movie, despite the Canadian accent, feels incredibly Nouvelle Vague. The scene cuts, the strange pretentiousness, the sort of hollow yet artsy dialogues – I loved them. This film is probably funnier than a Nouvelle Vague, because it’s making fun of itself. Curiously enough, I find this approach extremely healing. For somebody who is constantly afraid of the ‘coup de foudre’ happening to me and who knows very well the disastrous consequences when it happens, I find it extremely refreshing when the concept of ‘amour fou’ is taken down from its pedestal of ultimate romanticism and mocked like one mocks bourgeois hypocrisy. Hipsterdom is modern bourgeoisie.

The best thing about the film is how music is used, perhaps the most poignant aspect of the film’s irony and subtle humor. Okay, maybe it wasn’t actually that subtle – the whole thing is more or less about how the main characters fail at life, at communicating their feelings properly and even having anything like a relationship. In that respect, the end is also absolutely perfect.

There is one aspect of the film I personally don’t like though; I don’t quite understand why in the world the film cannot focus on the main characters. They are sort of unlikable, sort of stereotypical and, ultimately, they don’t do very much. It is painful to see how these humans are even capable of lying to each other and themselves. But whenever that incredible awkwardness becomes funny, I get to enjoy myself.
I think the movie would have been better if they had explored the main characters more, and have put all those little pieces of random people being interviewed into another film. Incidentally those interviews make the film feel pretentious, yet at the same time some of the things they say are just so painfully true, oh my god. So Nouvelle Vague hipster-style.

I love the umbrella! And Le Garrel!

Ultimately, I would say that the film is pretty much the exact opposite of what I am, or what I want to be, for that matter. I’m way beyond the time of being a smoky student who seems to never do anything serious, I don’t listen to that kind of music (though I thoroughly enjoyed it in this film), I don’t wear that kind of clothes and especially I am not into that type of man. In short, no identification potential of at all. But one has to appreciate how it’s surprisingly well-done with a script so full of seemingly effortless humor. Without even a German Wikipedia article, this is definitely an underrated film.

If only they didn’t use that cheesy song…

Alles auf Zucker

I felt an impressive amount of homesickness today. Certainly this sounds silly, and I have gone weeks without having spoken German at times, but when I feel weak, I found myself to think or dream in English instead of German. That is truly scary.

So, without further ado, here’s a German film. I picked it before it was the first one that showed up in my list, and because I knew nothing about it except that it would be a comedy. I heard he also made that Hitler movie with Helge Schneider, which I assume to be a good thing as well, so my expectations were not extremely high but at least reasonable.

Finally, the movie turned out to be pretty much exactly what I expected: Less funny than the cult classics “Sonnenallee” or “Good Bye, Lenin!” because it suffers from the same strange- and awkwardness most German comedies suffer from (why do the children all have to be incestuous anyways?), but funny enough for me to laugh out loud a few times. Opinions on the film seem to be very divided and that is more or less what I feel as well. If anything, I would compare the film, soaked with the Berliner accent, to “Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis”; just think of the Jews as a lovely culture to be made fun of, and you have the Ch’tis exactly. Sure, there are all the politics etc. but in terms of funny Jewishness, this here is more like when Woody Allen makes fun of his family or “A Serious Man” making fun of Jewishness altogether. A certain light-heartness remains at the end, and I assume that the denouement of the film is indeed difficult to swallow. When the main character recounts how everybody lived happily ever after, it is to be expected that it’s at least 50% irony yet a part of the truth remains. I think the characters are now taking their life with a grain of salt, yet there are true feelings involved in the final get-together of the family. It did not fail to move my non-Jewish Berlinian little heart.

German comedies should never be watched outside of Germany (and in fact, there are not very many French comedies I find funny either), yet at the same time I think that parts of them call for improvement. Better sex jokes for example, or leave them out altogether. “Alles auf Zucker” for example is doing absolutely great as a family comedy. At the same time I want to see “Good Bye Lenin!” again; I only saw it once in a movie theatre and inappropriately made out with my then-not-really-boyfriend.

The House of Mirth

Uhhh, what a Sittenroman, what a period drama. I have not seen a great story about a woman ever since “Die Ehe der Maria Braun” which was just as brilliant, emotionally touching and entirely devastating. This film is perhaps just a different form of what I have come to get used to in “Madame Bovary”, “Anna Karenina” or even the dreadful “Effi Briest”. But every one of them is a little different, and besides the apparent main difference between “The House of Mirth” and the aforementioned stories (Lily Bart is unmarried), the protagonist here is inherently ‘flawed’. She loves luxury like Marguerite Gautier in “La dame aux camélias” and while Marguerite downfall comes with her attempt to become a better person, Lily is never really given the opportunity to. In fact, her problems could have all dissipated if she never took up gambling and just married Mr. Selden. But here is where the beauty of her story is, and why she is more interesting than all those characters who are not bad, but plainly incapable. She is the own reason for her downfall.

But, Lily cannot be a different person than she is. While “La dame aux camélias” is an ode to the power of love and highly romantic and unrealistic that way, Lily is much more realistic in how she is torn between herself. She has all the power of changing or choosing one life over another, and so painfully many occasions too, but she couldn’t. Love, luxury, gambling, arrogance, ignorance towards other people – if she had been able to free herself from a single one of these ‘vices’, she would not have ended so tragically.

On a side note, I was so annoyed with that “French poet” who can’t pronounce French properly and, on top of that, fails at reading poems with the proper tone. Luckily he finished reading very quickly, ahahaha.

I thought Gillian Anderson was brilliant and completely outacted the entire cast (except maybe Laura Linney who was quite great as main evil character as well). I especially liked the way she talked and the way she kind of throws her head a little and laughs. She might not be a dashing beauty, but she can play a dashing beauty, which I find absolutely amazing. Her charm is like a role model like Anna Karenina when she seduces Levin, perhaps one of the greatest short scenes in the book.

For better or worse, I saw myself in the main character, and most likely it clouds my impression on the movie so different from “Distant Voices, Still Lives”. I thought the film was marvelously done, had a brilliant protagonist and as a result, it depressed me on many levels. Whether this means that the movie is so good that it made me feel depressed, or actually worse than I think because I associate myself too close with it personally – I do not know.